The board itself is straightforward enough, and typical of most GeForce 8600 GT PCBs, with no external power required and SLI support available. The cooling solution is really very modest compared to the massive protruding heatsink used by the EN8600GTS Silent, and comprises of simply one large heatsink over the core, designed to vent hot air out of the rear of the case. As with the EN8600GTS part, the bright, plastic 'Let's Game' section of the cooler looks a little cheap and out of place to me, but each to his own.

From the rear, we can see that the passive cooling solution aboard the EN8600GT Silent is a dual-slot one, as you may have already guessed from our earlier reference that the hot air is designed to be vented through the rear of the chassis. Unlike some GeForce 8600 GT-based parts we've seen that only feature one DVI port, ASUS' offering thankfully offers two, together with TV-out functionality.

A single copper heat pipe transfers heat from the core to the solid looking aluminum ASUS EN8600GT Silent

Graphics Engine

NVIDIA GeForce 8600 GT GPU (G84)

289 million transistors

3D GPU clock = 540MHz

32 Stream Processors at 1190MHz

NVIDIA Unified Architecture

GigaThread technology

Full support for Microsoft DirectX 10

Geometry shaders

Geometry instancing

Streamed output

Shader Model 4.0

Full 128-bit floating point precision through the entire rendering pipeline

NVIDIA Lumenex Technology

16x full screen anti-aliasing

Transparent multisampling and transparent supersampling

16x angle independent anisotropic filtering

128-bit floating point high dynamic-range (HDR) lighting with anti-aliasing